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Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval, I'm Matt Lewis. Shivalry is the famous backbone

of the medieval night and of medieval warfare. Or at least, that's what we're led to believe.

James titan's new book Deception in Medieval Warfare tackles this question head on.

What tricks did medieval generals have up their sleeve and how did they reconcile the use

of deception with their Shivalric principles? James is here to tell us more about the

underhand tactics and the medieval view of them. Welcome to Gone Medieval James.

Thank you very much for having me, Matt. It's a pleasure. What kind of source material

are you able to draw on to start with? As you explore deception in medieval warfare,

are we looking at chronicles? Are we looking at romantic stories that give us a bit of an insight?

Mostly what I'm looking at is chronicles. So these are narrative histories written down at the time,

either by contemporaries or by people living slightly later and drawing on other accounts.

Sometimes they're drawing on written accounts, sometimes they're drawing on rumours that are

circulating or eyewitnesses that may have been there. So it's not quite what we would call a

objective historical reporting, but it's the closest thing that we have in the Middle Ages.

But you mentioned romance and fiction and literature. I do draw on some of that a little bit in the

book because this is in some ways closer to what the fighting men of the period are reading and

listening to. Chronicles are written in Latin most of the time by clerics for other clerics.

There are secular individuals who can read Latin. We know this and it may be read to them.

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